F-Secure Antivirus is a great product that offers many of the standard functions associated with antivirus software, but also goes above and beyond the bar set by others with efforts by F-Secure to educate the people that use F-Secure Antivirus on general security practices as well as specific threats.
Ease of Use: F-Secure Antivirus is very easy to use and comes preconfigured with the most effective options for your computers security. The menu's within F-Secure Antivirus are simple and quick to display the options under each of them.
Effectiveness: F-Secure Antivirus is one of the most effective antivirus programs on the market. Its heuristic scanner is considered by many to be one of the fastest and most complete on the market.
We did have some problems with its on-access scanner though. The test system we used is a pretty fast system. Intel Pentium D 2.8GHz with 1GB of RAM. The on-access scanner would sometimes bring this system to a halt when opening programs or moving files.
Updates: F-Secure Antivirus checks for updates every two hours. This is fine for most people and shouldn't cause any problems. One issue that we did notice is that one of the updates that was receive required a reboot of the test system. While we had a choice in the reboot, it was odd that it should require a reboot to apply new virus signatures or even minor program updates.
Feature Set: F-Secure Antivirus comes with the standard protection you would expect from any modern antivirus suite. Both on-access and on-demand scanners are included as well as a spyware scanner that runs with both. An email scanner is also included for those of us using local mail clients like Outlook or Thunderbird.
One feature we especially liked about F-Secure Antivirus was the integrated news on the home menu. The Security News section is full of useful information about which new security threats are out and whether you are protected from each threat.
Ease of Installation: Installation of F-Secure Antivirus is fast and easy. It took less than 5 minutes to initially install, but required a very long update upon completion of the install. The install itself required a single reboot as well as the update that was download after the install finished.
Help/Support: F-Secure offers several options for support. They have a "How to" section with several FAQ's included as well as offering a product manual from within the program itself. Also available are phone support and email support. You may find that support for F-Secure Antivirus is difficult to obtain once you get past the self help options. The site is somewhat convoluted and could use a redesign to make it easier and faster to use. To be fair, most people will not need to contact customer support directly if they use the self help options that are available on the support site.
Summary: With one of the most thorough antivirus engines available, F-Secure Antivirus provides elite protection against viruses, spyware and many other security threats. The added benefit of the support and education portion of their website adds to the overall feeling of protection while using this product. While it isn't perfect, and does have issues with significant slowdowns while the on-access scanner is working, the overall product is effective.
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